It's Saturday. Yesterday it was 72 degrees here, and it is sunny and warmish here again. Do you feel like you are reading the diary of someone from 1912? Why did they always report the weather?
The point of me telling you this is that it gave me ample opportunity yesterday to pull ivy. And once again I'd like to THANK the person who introduced it into my yard in the first place. Really.
Thanks.
Anyway, as usual I could not find my gardening gloves. I have 900 pair of them and WHERE DO THEY ALL GO? I looked all in the shed, convinced I was gonna stare a family of copperheads in the face at any minute, and I found neither heads of copper nor gloves.
So I went bareback. And oh, I pulled. I yanked and I clipped and I tore and I tugged that ivy. And after filling a whole barrel, I stood up, and the tiniest section you ever saw was cleared.
Carp.
Then I remembered we needed cat litter, so Edsel and I got in the car and went to PetSmart. I cannot take both dogs with me somewhere when it is just me, because are they a couple of rambunctious dicks when they're together?Are they Lenny and Squiggy?
Helloooo.
So I got the 25-pound box of cat litter, which some A-hole in the packaging department over at Tidy Cat--and there's a job, "I'm in the packaging department at Tidy Cat"--decided a small, thin, sharp plastic handle would be good for lugging that heavy box.
Imagine spending two hours tugging ivy--and incidentally also poison ivy, which thank God doesn't affect me--for two hours with your bare hands. Then imagine having a pulling, rambunctious German shepherd puppy in one hand, and a 25-pound shard of plastic in your other hand.
Such was my joy yesterday afternoon.
"Ma'am, do you need help?" a young boy asked me as I minced to the checkout counter.
"Yes, I do, and I can't tell you how I like you Southern men," I said, looking un-insane with my red-dirt pants and my Annette Benning hair and my Ouiser jumping dog.
The nice guy, who he told me has a German shepherd as well, helped me all the way to my car, and since it was daytime and teeming with people I figured he couldn't kill me or anything. Plus I had that tough Edsel for protection. I noticed he had an LA hat on. "Are you from LA?" Nothing gets past me.
Turns out he was from Compton, which is, like, the worst neighborhood in the universe, and his parents sold their house there and bought their house here for cash. I almost said, "You can even sell a house in COMPTON and get a house for cash here," but I caught myself. However, that's exactly what Marvin said when I relayed the story.
Anyway, it was nice to be helped by a nonSouthern boy, and this kid was not black, so the part where I just said "boy" is not as awful as it sounds.
I am going to put on winter gloves today and hack at the ivy again. Once I get started on ivy I get obsessed. My hands look like Scarlett's when she visited Rhett in jail.
In the meantime, comment of the week goes to my personal friend--which kind of makes it sound like she is my vibrator but she isn't--Pal from MA, who discussed my pie panting and used the word "cooter." Click on This Week's Special if you need to see the use of the word "cooter" in a sentence. And who doesn't?
